The Bronx Ink

Nilka Martell has transformed her street since she lost her job last December. [HAZEL SHEFFIELD/The Bronx Ink]

It was a burning hot October afternoon in the Bronx when a small crowd of neighborhood kids gathered to watch a fallen tree airlifted into a truck by government workers. While the children stared, one local resident rushed forward to ask the workers if she could take wood chips to fill the tree pits and flowerbeds in the street.

“They said we can call whenever we need mulch!” said Nilka Martell, a mother of three. “That stuff costs hundreds of dollars to buy from the store.”

Martell would know. She has transformed Virginia Avenue in Parkchester since losing her paralegal job last December. After a long, cold winter unemployed and on benefits, Martell started volunteering for Department of Parks in April before gathering the courage to embark on a beautification project on her own street.

“You get so discouraged when you’re unemployed,” said Martell. “A friend and I got involved in volunteering so we don’t sit at home and go crazy, and at the same time we’re helping the neighborhood.”

Martell is one of an increasing number of New Yorkers keeping busy with volunteering as unemployment continues to stay high. Though New York falls far behind the national rate for volunteers, survey data compiled by government agency Volunteering In America shows that there was a climb in the number of people offering their time for free last year, from 16.4 percent in 2009 to 18.5 percent in 2010. That increase means an extra 300,000 people volunteering in New York, bringing the total number of volunteers to 2.8 million.

Statistics from Volunteering In America show that when unemployment hit 9.3 percent in 2010, 18.5 percent of the population took part in volunteer work. This is up from 2007, when the recession was officially declared. That year, 5.2 percent of New Yorkers were unemployed and only 14.7 percent volunteered.

Martell worked for a paralegal firm for 19 years before she lost her job. “I just figured I’d find another job quickly,” she said. “I’ve never had a problem finding a job.” As a single mother with two teenage children at home, it was a stretch to care for her family on savings and benefits and Martell had plenty of time sitting around at home to worry about the bills. After sending out resumes all winter, she starting to look at other ways to fill her time.

Though Martell was originally looking for legal work to help her get back into employment, she kept stumbling on online ads asking for volunteers with Department of Parks. Eventually, she signed up.

Soon Martell and her children Isaias, 13, and Lia Lynn, 15, were volunteering in parks all over the Bronx every weekend. Martell started looking for something to do closer to home. “I’ve lived in Virginia Avenue for 36 years and it’s always been such an eyesore,” Martell said. “There have always been high weeds, garbage and dog waste.”

“I thought, why not do something right here?” Martell said. “That way if I get bored I don’t have to wait until there’s an event.” She asked the owners of the C-town supermarket across the street if she could start caring for the flower beds behind their parking lot. Without any public funding, Martell and her friends were extremely resourceful, buying cut-price plants, saving dead bulbs and improvising border fencing from bits of scrap wood.

In just a few months, Mexican sunflowers started spilling into the street and bees appeared. Some residents even began clipping the big green leaves of the elephant ear plants to plant in their own gardens. Now, when Martell goes outside to work on the beds she is often joined by children from around block. Some of the kids are still learning English after moving from the Dominican Republic, but they are all keen to help water the flowers and plant new bulbs.

“This is a neighborhood where there are so many different cultures, but because of this project these kids have come together,” Martell said.

Though Martell is still sending out her resume for work, she’s now considering taking her beautification project elsewhere in the Bronx, helping other local residents transform their streets and invest in their communities.

“I didn’t think this was going to become this big,” she said with a smile. “If I hadn’t been laid off at this point in my life, there is no way I would be doing volunteer work.”

A view of Webster Avenue in Norwood. Photo: Elisabeth Anderson

Many business owners in the Norwood section of Webster Avenue were caught unaware last week when the city began its formal approval process for a rezoning plan to revitalize the commercial stretch.

“What rezoning?” asked Maurice Sarkissian, 40, whose Sarkissian Food Service Equipment & Supplies, a restaurant supply business, has been in his family – and on Webster Avenue – for 50 years.

If the plan is approved, Sarkissian and his business colleagues along the corridor may soon find out that it involves less commercial use on Webster Avenue from East Gun Hill Road to the north to East Fordham Road to the south.  The cutbacks would make way for the development of nearly 740 units of affordable housing and 100,000 square feet of retail space.  The goal is to make Webster Avenue a safe, lively and walkable corridor.

The Department of City Planning certified the plan last week, offering it for public review for up to 60 days.  From there, the plan faces several more levels of approval before making it to city council for a final vote.  Community Board 7 District Manager Fernando Tirado, 40, estimated that the vote could happen by March, and that construction could begin as early as the spring.

Sarkissian believes Webster Avenue’s wide boulevard will never be safe for children.  He believes that crime is not caused by businesses, but by poor policing.  The 52^nd Precinct reported a five percent increase in crime complaints from early September to early October as compared to the same period last year. Sarkissian blames businesses that are open until 2 or 3 a.m. “They need to cut out all the hangouts,” he said.

Sarkissian defended most of the businesses in the area.  “We keep the neighborhood nice, clean,” he said, adding that businesses like his were vital to the local Norwood economy because they bring customers into the big retail hubs along 204^th Street and Gun Hill Road. “To make a neighborhood, you can’t chase good people out,” Sarkissian said.

But Tirado said that the area has to look ahead. “We want some smarter development,” he said.  According to a city planning spokesperson, existing businesses would be grandfathered into the new zoning plan.  They can remain and invest in their properties, and potentially benefit from an expanded customer base and revived corridor.

A number of business owners, like Sarkissian, still felt their futures were in jeopardy, unsure if the changing dynamic of the neighborhood would create public pressure for commercial businesses to leave.

“That’s not too good cause we don’t know where we’re going to go,” said John Joe Bennett, 51, of the plan.  Bennett, a 51-year-old Jamaican immigrant with a wife and eight children to support, owns John Joe Auto.   His shop has been on Webster Avenue since 1992, and he said he felt secure only until his current lease ends, in December 2012.  “My customers are mostly local,” Bennett said.  “If we move, will they follow?”

One customer at an unmarked auto repair shop a few storefronts north of John Joe Auto thought the move was a good one.  Miguel Alcantara, 45, who drives a taxi for New College Car Service, praised the plan, saying “It needs to be safer here.” He said in the future he wouldn’t mind driving to a repair shop further away.

Public pressure could be a factor for Bennett, as his business does not fall within the confines of a three-block sliver of Webster Avenue north of 205^th Street that will remain zoned for exclusively auto-industry businesses.

Neither does Edmund Tierney’s business.  Tierney, 50, owns Tierney’s Auto Repair in the same building as Bennett’s.   “if it brings more people to the area, it has to be good,” said Tierney, who lives in Yonkers with his wife and three children.

Residents tend to share Tierney’s optimism.  “It’s not safe at night,” said Floyd Middleton, 44, who lives around the corner from Webster Avenue on 204^th Street with his wife and two children.  “There’s a lot of gang-related violence at night.”  He believes the uptick in crime is related to fewer jobs; he has been looking for work himself for nearly a year.  Middleton thinks that bringing more retail positions to the area will help.

“If we develop, it’ll be a good thing,” he said.  He hoped to see large chain stores and a supermarket on Webster Avenue, so his family would not have to trek to Fordham Road or 125^th Street in Manhattan for clothes and groceries.

But Chris McDonald, a 43-year-old Jamaican immigrant who is an apprentice auto mechanic at John Joe Auto, scratched his head over that notion.  Norwood is already awash in retail, he noted.  Not to mention his prospects for future work.  “I’ve just started,” McDonald said.  “I’d like to stay a while.”

Story by Shreeya Sinha, Lynsey Chutel and Sunil Joshi

While the national jobs figure for March indicated that the country is on the path to economic recovery, the employment picture in the Bronx was not so sanguine. Unemployment in the borough remains several points above the national average, and thousands of residents are still unable to find work.

For more coverage of Bronx job hunters, click here.

Above the bustling business hub of 149th Street and Third Avenue, rows of almost 50 people sat on Thursday in a cordoned-off waiting room in the Workforce 1 office, looking for help from the Bronx branch of the citywide employment agency.

This was Veronica Eaddy’s second time at the “one-stop employment center.” With a soft round face under thick waves, in a casual jeans and T-shirt, Eaddy, who asked that her full name not be used, doesn’t look her age at 42. But the string of jobs she has tried her hand at reveal a long struggle with unemployment. “I’ve been through many systems where a job has been promised and nothing happened,” Eaddy said.

Nationwide, there may be reason for optimism after the jobs report revealed that the depressed economy may be turning around. The U.S. Department of Labor announced on Friday that 162,000 jobs were added to the national economy, though the nationwide unemployment rate remained steady at 9.7 percent. But an increase in the national jobs number does not necessarily correlate to an increase in the number of jobs in the Bronx, said James Brown, an analyst with the New York Department of Labor. “There’s not a one-for-one increase,” he said. For Bronx job-seekers like Eaddy, economic struggles are still festering.

“You pretty much need a master’s degree to pick up the garbage,” said Eaddy, who feels that living in the Bronx has been a disadvantage for her. She’s spent the last seven years looking for a full-time job. Unemployment in the borough soared to 14 percent in January, well above the national average. Hunger and poverty are stark realities in the borough that is already struggling to compete with a higher-skilled workforce.

“That doesn’t bode well for the Bronx, which has a pretty high percentage of the local workforce that doesn’t have high levels of educational attainment,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, a research firm.

About half of Bronxites work outside the borough, Brown said. Many of these jobs in the hospitality and retail sectors are not only low-paying but largely dependent on consumer spending, which has sunk deeply in the recession. Analysts are hopeful that consumers will grudgingly start spending. Consumer spending picked up for the sixth month running in March.

“A lot of establishments are closing,’’ Eaddy said. “There aren’t many jobs that you could get if you come straight off school, like low-skilled jobs. And most of them can be pretty crap.”

Arthur Merlino, manager of Workforce 1, has worked in the labor market for 48 years, crisscrossing labor offices across the city’s five boroughs. After two years managing the Bronx branch, he admits that the borough poses a specific challenge. “This is a real serious time,” said Merlino, his eyes closing as he spoke. “I’d say, experientially it’s been a very difficult couple of years.”

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. has made economic development and job creation a priority but critics have accused him of costing the Bronx thousands of jobs at a mall he opposed at the Kingsbridge Armory. Diaz opposed the project on the grounds that it would not provide Bronxites living wages. The City Council voted against the mall.

Franck Strongbow, associate director of the James Monroe Senior Center agreed with Diaz. After he spent eight months living “between a rock and a hard place,” Strongbow lived paycheck to paycheck when he was 25 years old trying to make ends meet. For him, a job is all about dignity. “What the borough president was saying was, “Let’s start with affordable living range because people should be paying an honest day’s labor.” According to the Center for Urban Future, 42 percent of the Bronx workforce is making less than $10 an hour.

The payroll company Automatic Data Processing said this week that U.S. employers cut 23,000 jobs in March, dampening expected forecasts ahead of Friday’s job report. Much of the nationwide growth in March was in temporary government jobs, particularly by the Census Bureau, which hired 48,000 temporary employees, according to the Department of Labor, including enough staff for four Census offices in the Bronx.

Elsewhere, there are signs of life in the borough’s jobs market. A coalition of construction workers in the Bronx said it has seen employment opportunities tick upward in March, with more activity on job sites. While the overall number of new building permits issued in the Bronx during the first three months of the year is down from 2009 — 44 to 18 — there were eight new building permits issued in the Bronx in March (up from four last year), according to the Department of Buildings. Richard Rodriguez, an administrator for United Hispanic Construction, said that his labor coalition was able to connect more workers with jobs in March, particularly with a new development on 163rd Street in Morrisania.

Despite the real-estate market’s more than two-year struggle, prices in Manhattan remain high, fueling new development in the outer boroughs, said Ken Margolies, director of organizing programs at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations. But while Margolies noted the signs of improvement, he cautioned against unbridled optimism. “The key thing about the news,” he said, “is that, by and large, the new jobs that are being created pay less than the ones that are being lost.”

The manufacturing sector is another industry that saw accelerated growth in March, according to the Institute for Supply Management, a private trade group. In February about 11,000 jobs were created, the largest increase in almost four years. Other sectors like health care have also done well, especially after President Obama’s health care plan passed. In March, 27,000 new health care jobs were added to the national economy, according to the Department of Labor.

That’s where Eaddy hopes to try her luck. She’s optimistic that the health care reform will revitalize jobs in this sector. “Since there was such a push going on in public health, I think that a lot of jobs are going to start that I want to get into while the getting in is good,” she said. Eaddy is trying to secure a voucher from the New York State Department of Labor that will cover a six-month-long Medical Billing and Coding course at Hostos Community College. Waving a manila folder on Thursday, with the college brochure inside, she checked that she had all her documentation. She had been waiting for move than an hour for her 4 p.m. appointment.

While she waits for a steady job, Eaddy decided to start her own business. “Splendidly Me,” a cosmetic business that she runs out of her East 180th Street apartment, supplements her income. When she is not teaching customers how to make coconut oil or twist their hair, Eaddy is pinning her long-term hopes on the health care industry.

“Now I have to come back,” she said, “but this time I’m doing something smart with a marketable skill so that I can have some leverage.”

At the Morton Williams in Kingsbridge, people lined up to apply for an entry-level job. (Fellman/Bronx Ink)

Atavia Scott dreams of being a chef. Nicole Garcia wants to write about travel. And Sophia Pritchet wants to work at the retailer Forever 21. But each has had to put these dream jobs aside for now, and search more widely for that increasingly elusive commodity in the Bronx: the job.

Read more about umemployment in the Bronx here.

On a recent morning, they joined the line of some 40 job applicants at the Morton Williams in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, where the supermarket chain holds weekly interviews for openings at its 12 stores in the city. A manager laid out the application guidelines to the job seekers while a few shoppers strolled by.

“Again, you must know the name of the company and the address of the company” you use as a reference on the application form, explained Valerie Sloan, a vice president at the supermarket.

After explaining other aspects of the hiring process and twice stressing that those without proper identification should leave, Sloan, who declined any comment, returned to the small office perched in a corner above the store exit and called the first applicant.

Those near the front of the line sat down on the ledge running along the storefront window. The line snaked along the wall past the checkouts and the nine-foot-high stack of Malta India soda bottles until finally coming to an end half-way down aisle three just before the Stella D’Oro cookies. Since the supermarket chain holds their applications for six months, most of the job seekers were new.

Even as the national economy added 162,000 jobs nationally in March, according to the latest Department of Labor estimate, in the Bronx, where the unemployment rate is now at 14 percent, the employment market is becoming cutthroat, forcing experienced workers to apply for entry-level positions and others to vastly expand their job search.

Supermarket work wasn’t Atavia Scott’s first choice, but she lost her job as a health aide in January and has applied for over a dozen others without luck. In the last two weeks alone, Scott, who is 27 and lives in Soundview, has applied to more than 15 places—everything from health care to Rite Aid.

“Right now, I’ll work anywhere,” Scott said. “I’m not being a chooser.”

Scott said her interview with Sloan “went OK.” The manager told her that the supermarket was hiring five applicants to work as cashiers or in the deli, and that she’d get a call next week if they had a position for her. They were minimum wage jobs, Scott said, but at least there was a union and some benefits. Still, Scott wasn’t content to wait a week. Afterwards, she left to inquire at a home health agency in Mott Haven.

In many respects, Ben—who declined to give his last name because he feared it might hurt his prospects with the supermarket chain—has had a harder time. He said he had spent 30 years working in supermarkets, until he lost his job managing a food market in Queens in 2007. Ben, now 56, can’t find a job fitting his experience level.

“Some tell me I’m overqualified, some tell me I don’t have enough experience for the position that available,” he said. “All those fast food places—they’re all hiring. But it’s part time work at a minimum wage. They don’t require experience because they do on-the-job training.”

He’s applied to Macy’s, the Restaurant Depot, Sears. “I’ve gone so far as to apply for a job as a secretary,” he added.

Meanwhile, the pressure to stay solvent has been mounting, Ben said. Unable to afford his rent, he had to move his wife and two children to a shelter and now supports them on only $41 in food stamps and $1,720 in public assistance a month.

“It’s really hard to make ends meet when you don’t have much coming in each month,” he said. “I’m out here every day looking for a job. Even on Sundays.”

At the interview, Ben told Sloan that he was applying for a department head position at Morton Williams. Sloan said that no positions were available, but that she’d forward the application to her supervisor. Ben said the supermarket’s benefits were good—medical, dental, raises every six months—and hoped to hear back if a position opened up over the next few months.

Ana Pena, meanwhile, needed a job now. The 56-year-old Dominican immigrant has been out of work for nearly a year after she lost her job cleaning at a McDonald’s. Although she is living with a niece, she said that she wasn’t on Medicaid and needed to get a job as much for the pay as for the health insurance. She was attracted to Target for the employee benefits.

“I was trying to get a job with Target, but they never called me,” she said. “I wish I could get me a job making $8 an hour.”

Pena’s niece suggested she try Morton Williams. But Pena arrived at 9:30 am—15 minutes after they stopped accepting applications. Sloan told her to come back next week.

“It’s ok,” she said. “I’ll be here next time at 8 o’clock.”

In Feb. 2010, Omar Mitchell, 38, lost his job. That was when his life took a dramatic turn; his girlfriend left him with their child, his family and friends started treating him differently, assuming he’s knocking their doors for help… Yet, Mitchell is not giving up, he’s been spending most of his time between job centers in the Bronx and around.

Video produced and reported by Rania Zabaneh.

Video by Rania Zabaneh

Carlos Martines is a regular at the Department of Labor “Workforce 1” job center in the Bronx, and he’s desperate to find some work to support his family.

“I’m late on my rent, bills. It’s hard, its very hard,” he said. “You know my son depends on me, you know it’s hard, very hard right now. There are no jobs.”

The Bronx has the highest unemployment rate in New York City.

Arthur Merlino, the community service manager at the Department of Labor in the Bronx, says certain factors have made the Bronx extremely vulnerable to the recession.

“I think that in the Bronx approximately 40 percent of the population is at the lower income standard,” he said. “And I think there are a good number of them who have various kinds of employment barriers including a lower level of education than prevails in the rest of the city. And I think that’s a major factor.”

Another hopeful statistic in the jobs report is in the manufacturing sector. About 11,000 jobs were created, according to the report, the largest growth in almost four years.

But Ken Margolies, director of organizing programs at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations, said that job creation in manufacturing might not affect New York City as much. “One of the reasons why manufacturing has been leaving New York City for years is that the real estate is more valuable for other things,” he said.

National statistics also showed that construction continued to suffer, as businesses grappled with the recent crisis in the commercial estate market. In an effort to find a sector that might create jobs, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. recently secured a $4 million federal grant to create green jobs in the community.

This comes after the borough president opposed the now-defeated re-development of Kingsbridge Armory on the grounds that the proposed mall would not create living-wage jobs.

“In order for our borough to get out of this long slide of unemployment, we need to fight against poverty, to educate and train our residents to become a skilled work force, to ensure that when companies come to do business here, those new jobs are offered to Bronxites,” he said in an emailed statement.

But Margolies, who worked with the community organization, is cautious about the green-job approach. “It’s really kind of early to know whether it will be a bigger boom or not,’’ he said. A lot depends on whether the government would subsidize it to create a lot of work in those areas.”

Even Americans who have jobs are feeling the slump. The underemployment rate, which counts people who have given up looking for work and part-time workers, has steadily risen over the past year to almost 16.5 percent nationwide, according to the Labor Department’s report.

Francis Ayalah works in part-time retail and says she works the hours of a full-time employee. “There’s nobody hiring full time,” she said.

State Senator Ruben Diaz, a Bronx Democrat, says he sees people like Ayalah every day. “In my office here in the South Bronx, I have people coming in daily looking for jobs,’’ he said. “I’m pretty sure the economy will recover, but how do I tell that to someone who doesn’t have a job?” He breathed a deep sigh on the phone.

“President Barack Obama promised to create jobs, and he has failed” he said. ” If the president doesn’t create jobs, I’m sure us Democrats will lose seats because the nation is turning away from Democrats.”

Daniel Martin hung out on the street corner of East 175th Street and Eastburn Avenue, explaining that he lost his job last year as a window installer. Friday he was searching for better prospects. “I filled out applications at McDonald’s and Wendy’s, without any luck,” he said.

The Workforce 1 Career Center on East 149th St. in the Bronx is bustling with people seeking employment. (Alec Johnson/ The Bronx Ink)

By Alec Johnson

There are lines everywhere. Lines to get in, lines to ask questions and lines for the bathroom. At an unemployment office in the Bronx, it seems like waiting is the only job that many who need work can get.

The Bronx is no stranger to joblessness. But as the poorest congressional district in the country,  Bronx County has been hit by the recession harder than much of the nation. Even residents who are used to getting a steady paycheck now find themselves competing for jobs that have disappeared. As national unemployment levels reached a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October, Bronx unemployment surged further to reach 13.3 percent. That translates into more than 185,000 Bronx residents who are out of work, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now, instead of earning a living, they wait in line. Their path to the Workforce I Career Center on 149th Street may have begun in the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico or just up the street on the Grand Concourse. But now they are all looking for the same thing: hope.  Each face in the line tells a story. An immigrant from Ghana relies on his faith to keep him going.  A father struggles to find a way to support his family.  A former prisoner who admits he made mistakes searches for a way back into the world.

The newest faces in the line belong to former proud members of the working class, people who haven’t had to depend on social services in the past. Now, like so many others, they, too, can only wait. “A significant population of Bronx works in service and support jobs and when the main economic engine disappears that obviously ripples out,” said Jim Brown, an analyst for the state labor department.

Theresa Landau, the director of the Morrisania Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) federal nutrition program calls this group of recently unemployed, the “new poor.” The term, she said, characterizes those who held jobs that have evaporated because of the recession. A recent study by The New York Times found that unemployment has led to a large increase in reliance on food pantries and federal programs across the nation. The study found that 29 percent of Bronx residents are relying on food stamps.

These are the people who are actively trying to find jobs and don’t want to just sit back and collect government checks, but may soon be forced to. Last week, they streamed into the Work Force 1 office,  only to leave the same way they went in: unemployed.

“I’ve been coming here every day for seven weeks,” said Joe Cologne, a laid-off maintenance worker who is married, has three children between the ages of three and five and has lost two jobs in the past two years. Cologne’s daily trips over the past two months to the Workforce 1 office have left him discouraged.

“I want to make a good living,” he said. “At times I can’t sleep. I want to get a job.”

Leaning against the wall and squinting his eyes even though it was a cloudy day, Cologne spoke softly and sadly about why he waits in line every day.

“I’m trying to find something steady,” he said. “I’m sick of moving from job to job.”

Cologne had his last job for only six months and made $12.60 an hour.  Before that, he spent from January to March sending out resumes.

Happy that he saved some money for a rainy day and that his wife has managed to keep a low-paying custodial job, Cologne’s family hasn’t needed to count on public assistance. He is, however, worried that when he finds work, he will only get a minimum-wage job. Two years ago, the labor department set him up with a job that paid only $6.25 an hour.

“You can’t support a family and pay rent on that,” said Cologne, whose monthly rent is $1,300, not including utilities.

A minimum wage job, which now pays $7.25 an hour, is just a fraction of the $21 hourly wage guaranteed by his union, 32BJ SEIU, the largest property services workers union in the country.

A union job would be ideal for Cologne, but if one is not available, there are services such as food pantries and the WIC program that could help feed his kids.

According to Landau, the WIC program provides benefits to approximately 8,000 people in the Bronx and she hopes to increase that to 9,200 this year. Statewide, the number counting on WIC grew from 509,752 in August 2008 to 520,477 a year later.

“We’re hoping to open up new sites in communities that have not typically been considered low income,” she said, about targeting people like Cologne who would qualify for assistance because they have children under age five.

WIC  is a Department of Health program for people who  make up to 85 percent more than the poverty level. For example, a family of four with a combined income of $40,793 would qualify if they had infants. Unlike a food pantry, WIC gives participants a check they can use to buy nutritious food, such as fruit, vegetables, milk, whole grain bread and eggs for pregnant women, infants and young children.

But looking for help from the government is still an uncomfortable experience for many in the line. One man outside Workforce 1 used to make his living helping people. Now, he’s the one who needs help.

“This is my first experience” with unemployment, said the man, who immigrated to New York from Ghana 12 years ago. “I always had work—no problem.”

The man, who is a U.S. citizen his late 60s would not give his name, but said he is a former employee of the Human Resources Administration of New York City. He was laid off two years ago from the city organization, which provides temporary relief for individuals with social service and economic needs, and now is in search of work himself.

“It is difficult to get a job,” he said.

Since losing his job, he has lived on his savings, a part of which he sends to his wife and children in Ghana. And although the unemployment office hasn’t yet found him a job, he said he has taken advantage of computer classes offered to the jobless and is in the process of getting a master’s degree in theology of the Christian ministry at the Bible College at the New Covenant Christian Church in the Bronx.

“You have to engage yourself in doing something,” he said. “You must force yourself into something and stick to that.”

His theology studies have “helped him through,” and eventually he hopes to enter the ministry where he will teach Bible school and counsel parishioners.

“I want to help people,” he said.

Stressing the importance of searching for work, he said. “You can be proud if you are looking for a job, but not if you collect assistance without trying.”

Factors such as difficulty with English, poor education and even criminal records contribute to the Bronx’s higher unemployment rate, said Brown.

That’s the case with Joe Carter, who hasn’t had a job in four years and is on food stamps. He was released from a three-year prison sentence for narcotics possession six months ago and has been looking for work since then.

“I need a job,” said Carter, a father of a five-year-old daughter. “I’m working every angle.”

Sharply dressed in shirt and tie and a black coat, he clutched a paper he thought would be a key to a job. He earned the training certificate in prison after taking a six-month course at Bronx Community College in building maintenance.

He said he couldn’t find a job before he got in trouble, “but it’s definitely worse now” and  he doesn’t see the end in sight.

“I’m just holding on,” he said. “I hope the economy picks up and I can get a job in the near future.”

According to Brown, there just aren’t enough jobs to go around in the Bronx.

A significant portion of Bronx residents need to travel outside the borough for work and the farther people need to go from their home to find work,  the more difficulties they have. In the city, it’s not so hard, he said. But when the jobless try to go north to Westchester County, for example — where the unemployment level is nearly six percentage points lower — affordable transportation is a huge obstacle.

Ed Buggs commutes every day from the Bronx to Queens for a low-wage job.  A former bus driver, Buggs, 45, lost that job last year and recently started driving for Access-A-Ride,  a car service that drives the elderly and disabled to appointments.

Although Buggs is employed, he said the driving job isn’t enough to fulfill his dream of going to college. “I’ve been putting out resumes and got one call back.” Buggs has his second interview at a hospital next week for a housekeeping position. The hospital, he said, offers tuition reimbursement, which would fund his education.

Buggs battled the lines inside the drab Workforce 1 office to get help writing a thank-you note to the hospital where he interviewed last week. If he gets the second job and goes to college, Buggs hopes to find a steady job so he never needs to wait in that line again.